SEL Activity Cards to Promote Healthy Brain & Body Balance
Social-emotional learning plays such an important role in the lives of our students in today’s digital media world. When adults model and reinforce the appropriate use of digital device management — such as online social interactions, appropriate balance of screen time versus unplugged activities, and responding to feedback of digital texts — students can gain valuable real-life lessons on how to model and be in control of their online digital presence. These new digital skills can help students make better lifetime social-emotional learning (SEL) choices, whether they are online or offline.
Student coping strategies coupled with student personal ownership of brain and body balance choice techniques are a must for allowing students to be in control of their own SEL needs and reactions. As adults, when we guide students with successful learning models of digital life examples, and stress the importance that students have choice in their learning to solve problems they are facing with friends, students feel empowered to contribute to a greater good of social responsibility among their peers.
So, how can we as educators help students navigate through all the online social pressures they are facing in their digital lives? I have found a solution for you!
You need to check out this excellent web resource called Adventure 2 Learning. This video-based platform for schools rolled out a brand-new program, Digital Life, which is designed to help schools and families meet kids’ growing needs around being safe, responsible, and respectful in today’s digital world. Whatever you call it, digital citizenship or digital literacy is a subject that is necessary for today’s Digital Life.
This Adventure 2 Learning program is truly helping kids find connections, take in perspectives, and make good decisions online and offline. A2L’s suite of Digital Life videos and activities are founded in social-emotional competencies using CASEL’s framework, which promotes intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cognitive competence. Better yet — for us as educators — they have accompanying lesson plans for grades 3–5 and 6–8 that are embedded with a SEL approach. Each lesson takes about 25 minutes, but the lessons can easily be extended as the main activity revolves around the hands-on Brain & Body Activity Cards.
I am super excited about these 10 hands-on Brain & Body Activity Cards! These cards encourage learners to dive deeper into digital dilemma scenarios in innovative and creative ways such as drawing, prototyping, writing, etc. These Brain & Body Activity Cards also could help students by providing new coping strategies and techniques for how to handle digital life situations in today’s real world. These Brain & Body Activity Cards also empower students’ voice and choice in learning and in how they want to respond to the video clips. The cards can be sent home for family engagement activities, too, thus providing a community-wide approach to promoting good digital citizenship. This is a win-win for everyone!
So, what are you waiting for? Check out this brand-new Digital Life program designed to help schools and families meet kids’ growing needs around being safe, responsible, and respectful in today’s digital world at Adventure 2 Learning!
